A guest landing on your restaurant's website has three questions in mind: what's on the menu, what does it cost, and are you open right now. They will give you about ten seconds to answer — usually while standing on a street corner, on a tram, or in a car with friends waiting for a decision.
If they don't find the answer in that time, they won't email you to ask. They will go back to the search results and click the next restaurant. You will never know they were there.
Below are the ten mistakes that most reliably destroy those ten seconds, ordered by how much they cost you. For each one: how to check it on your own site, and what to change.
1. The menu is a PDF
This is the most expensive mistake on the list, because it affects exactly the information the guest came for.
A PDF opened on a phone looks like an A4 sheet shrunk to screen width. To read the prices, the guest has to zoom in, pan right, pan down, zoom again. After the third round of that, they close the tab.
There is also a problem you can't see: Google treats a PDF as a separate document, not as part of your site. Your dishes, their names and their prices never become page content. When someone searches "wood-fired pizza near Old Town", the search engine has nothing to match.
How to check: open your own menu on your own phone, on a weak signal, one-handed. If you have to zoom, it doesn't work.
What to do: the menu needs to be an ordinary HTML page you can scroll with a thumb. More on that on our PDF menu alternative page.
2. No prices on the menu
Restaurants hide prices for one of two reasons: fear of scaring people off, or because prices change and nobody wants to re-export the file.
The effect is the opposite of the intention. A guest who can't see prices assumes the worst — usually 30–40% above what you actually charge. Worse, the missing price reads as "this page is out of date".
The second reason disappears on its own once the menu stops being a file to upload. When the menu is edited online, a price change takes fifteen seconds instead of a request to a designer.
3. Opening hours that are out of date
"Are they open now?" is a question that needs an instant answer. Three things usually break it:
- hours that exist only inside a footer graphic, so they can't be selected or read on a phone,
- no information about holidays and closures — public holidays are the worst possible day to get this wrong,
- a mismatch between the website and the Google Business Profile, which is where 8 in 10 people check first.
Your profile and your website have to say the same thing.
4. The page takes longer than 3 seconds to load
In hospitality the usual cause isn't code, it's photos. The photographer delivers 6–8 MB files, someone uploads twenty of them into a gallery, and the page weighs 100 MB. On office Wi-Fi it looks fine. Out in the street, on one bar of signal, it takes fifteen seconds.
How to check: put your address into PageSpeed Insights and look only at the Mobile tab. A score below 50 means you are losing guests you will never count.
What to do: gallery images should not exceed 200–300 KB. Use WebP or AVIF instead of JPG, and cap the width at 1600 px.
5. A pop-up the moment someone arrives
A newsletter banner, a full-screen cookie notice and a promo overlay — all at once, before the guest has seen anything.
On a desktop you can close them. On a phone the little X often falls off the edge of the screen. This isn't a matter of taste — Google has demoted mobile pages with intrusive interstitials since 2017.
6. A phone number you can't tap
A number baked into an image, or set as plain text, forces people to memorise and retype it. Make it a tel: link — one tap and the phone rings.
The address should open maps rather than sit there as words. A guest who found you at 8:30 pm wants to tap and walk, not copy an address into another app.
7. No mobile version, or a "mobile version" from 2015
More than three quarters of visits to restaurant websites come from phones. Even so, you still find sites designed for a monitor, where the text renders at 8 pixels and the buttons sit so close together you can't hit the right one.
A separate warning sign is an address starting with m. — a decade-old approach that today means two sites to keep updated and double the trouble in search.
8. Stock photos instead of your own dishes
A salad with a smiling model in the background signals that there is nothing real to show. Guests recognise those pictures instantly — they have seen them on five other sites already.
Photos of your own dishes, taken on a phone next to a window, work better than a professional shoot of somebody else's food. You don't need all of them — the 10 most ordered items is enough.
9. A menu that doesn't match reality
A dish came off the menu 6 months ago but is still on the site. Prices predate 2 increases. Last spring's seasonal offer is still on the homepage.
This costs twice. The guest arrives for something that doesn't exist, and stops believing the rest of the page — including the opening hours they drove across town for.
The cause is almost always the same — updating requires going through someone outside the business. When the menu can be fixed from a phone in two minutes, the problem disappears. We covered this in seasonal menu update: everything you need to know.
10. No obvious next step
The guest has read the menu and likes it. Now what?
There has to be exactly one visible primary action: book, order, or call. Not three equal buttons in three different colours. If you don't take reservations, say so plainly and explain how it actually works ("walk-ins only; Friday after 7 pm is usually full").
How to fix this without rebuilding the site
Eight of the ten mistakes above come down to one thing — the menu. Once the menu stops being a file and becomes a page you can edit from a phone, the PDF problem, the pricing problem, the freshness problem and the page-weight problem all disappear at once.
With WMenu the menu is its own fast page: guests open it without an app, see current prices and photos, and you change the content in the panel in 15–30 seconds. It attaches to your existing website with one link — there is nothing to rebuild.
If you don't have a website yet, or the current one is beyond saving, look at our restaurant website page, which puts the menu, hours and map in one place. You can also browse QR menu examples from real venues first.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to replace the whole website to fix the menu?
No. The menu can live at its own address and be linked from your current site and from your Google Business Profile. That is usually a one-link change.
Is a PDF menu always bad?
As the only version — yes. As an extra alongside a normal menu page, for people who want to print it — it does no harm.
How much should a restaurant website cost?
The range is enormous, from a few hundred for a template to five figures for a custom build. More important than the price is who will update the menu and what that costs every time. Run the numbers in our savings calculator.
What should I fix first if I only have time for one thing?
The menu. Points 1, 2 and 9 on this list are all about the menu, and together they account for most of the guests you lose.
